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Recently, Rick Peacock, one of the developers of
CFAST (Consolidated Fire And Smoke Transport), the NIST zone fire model, created
a Discussion Group and Issue Tracking system for CFAST that is identical to the
one used for FDS (GoogleCode and GoogleGroups). A considerable number of
you told us via your letters of a few months ago that you use CFAST on a regular
basis, and we are still committed to maintaining CFAST along with FDS.
Although most of our development efforts are aimed at FDS, there are still many
applications that are well suited for the two-zone assumption, and our recent
Validation work with the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NUREG 1824)
demonstrated that CFAST produces comparable results to FDS for these
applications. In fact, the NRC V&V'ed five fire models, two sets of
empirical models, two zone models, and one CFD (FDS), and the results indicate
where and when these models are appropriate.
Although CFAST was developed in the 1980's, there
have been steady improvements made over the years. The US NRC funded
a new Graphical User Interface for CFAST, along with improved documentation and
the V&V study. Glenn Forney has extended Smokeview to show CFAST
output. Bryan Klein helped Rick develop the new CFAST support site. What
we need now is feedback. We'd like to know how the new features are working.
We'd like to make CFAST as robust and reliable as possible, especially since it
can be such a useful screening tool to determine if you even need to use FDS for
a particular application. Your letters were extremely valuable in that
they indicated that the field of fire protection engineering relies on a variety
of analysis tools from simple hand calculations all the way to CFD.
The entry point for the new CFAST support services
is http://cfast.nist.gov/. Please
make use of the new services so that we can continue to maintain this valuable
tool.
Kevin
Kevin McGrattan
National Institute of Standards and Technology 100 Bureau Drive, Mail Stop 8663 Gaithersburg MD 20899 Phone: 301 975 2712 Fax: 301 975 4052 |